


Communication and what was left unsaid

by Melime



Category: Stargate Atlantis
Genre: Alternate Universe - Soulmates, Happy Ending, M/M, Writing on Skin
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-25
Updated: 2017-12-25
Packaged: 2019-02-20 05:21:06
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,240
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13139907
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Melime/pseuds/Melime
Summary: John never believed in soulmates. Months of communicating with his soulmate through messages written on their skin prove him wrong, but things are never that easy.





	Communication and what was left unsaid

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Hyx_Sydin](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Hyx_Sydin/gifts).
  * Translation into Português brasileiro available: [Comunicação e o que não foi dito](https://archiveofourown.org/works/13472760) by [Melime GreenLeaf (Melime)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Melime/pseuds/Melime%20GreenLeaf)



> So this took a lot longer than planned, but the idea was so good it just got away from me. The prompt was "Whatever mark you get on your skin your soulmate gets it too so one day, you just kind of just get a sharpie and start writing on your skin. You definitely didn’t expect to get a reply, but you did."

John didn’t believe in soulmates.

Well, that wasn’t strictly true. He knew soulmates existed, he even knew he had one. He had an entire childhood of occasional cuts and bruises that weren’t his showing up on his skin, and once was nearly expelled because of some random equation he didn’t even understand appearing out of nowhere on his palm during an exam. Even nowadays he would still get occasional ink stains on his hands, which was a nice little reminder that his soulmate was still out there, alive and kicking.

His problem was more with the concept of soulmates, as in the idea that there was one person out there who was absolutely perfect for you, the person who would fix everything in your life as long as you had the luck to be blessed by fate and found that person in time.

Most people didn’t, and only some of those were dumb enough to keep their lives on hold while they waited for that chance meeting. Others tried their hand at picking their own partners, with varying levels of success.

John was part of the second group once, although one failed marriage was enough for him. He didn’t intend on trying again, but was even less willing to wait for a supposed soulmate to make everything right. The wrongs of his past no one could make right, not even himself.

\---

Of all the ways his life could be turned upside down again, being invited to another galaxy didn’t even make the list.

Some people would jump at the chance with no hesitation, others would have too much to leave behind. For him, it was a tossup. He had nothing to lose and he wasn’t so sure he would have anything to gain either way.

His potential soulmate didn’t even figure in his decision making. He never took that into account and wouldn’t start now. He wasn’t the only one, although it didn’t even occur to him to ask around, he doubted more than a handful of them ever met their soulmates, and if anyone met their soulmate, they either died or things didn’t work out somehow, because as far as he knew there were no couples among those going.

Still, it was hard to care about such things when they had an alien ship with almost no power left and there were space vampires chasing them.

The first time he thought about his soulmate after leaving Earth was about a month after they were settled in Atlantis. He was showering when he noticed an ink stain on the side of his hand, as if he had accidentally wiped a white board while writing. Without thinking, he tried to clean it, only to have realization hit him in the gut. He stared at his hand, and for the first time in his life he felt sorry for his soulmate, and almost guilty. Of course odds always were that they would never meet, but he had removed himself from the equation, and now there was no chance. He couldn’t change that, but the least he could do was letting that poor sucker know they would never meet their soulmate, just in case they were the waiting type.

It was against the rules, and his soulmate was probably going to hate him for it. He never did understand why people were so against communicating with their soulmates before meeting them, especially when it meant that the vast majority of the population would never meet theirs, and some would even meet them and not even know who they were. Still, the chance meeting was a big part of the magic and using the connection to communicate would essentially end the chance element. He never even heard of someone doing something like this, but everyone already thought he was a rule breaker, he might as well do this.

The problem was, he didn’t have anything he could write with. That was rich, he traveled to another galaxy, and they could more or less solve the power and the food problem, but a pen was asking too much. And it was a good thing that he didn’t need any paper, because that was worth more than chocolate there.

\---

He had gone to check on McKay when the solution to his predicament presented itself. McKay was ranting about having to work with what he considered lesser scientists, and while he talked he was waving around his black marker wildly. No one in the military remembered to bring pens, but the scientists had brought along several boxes of the stuff, and weren’t exactly careful with them. No one would notice if he took one, so that was exactly what he did before leaving.

John resisted the urge to go hide in his office and get this over with. The sooner he did this, the sooner he would be able to put this all behind him, but it was better to wait until her could write in a visible place and then clean himself after leaving a reasonable time for his soulmate to have seen it, meaning that it was probably best to write on his hand and leave it overnight, as his soulmate could be in any timezone.

When he finally went to his room after dinner, he wished he could have a beer, or really anything that would help excuse the terrible decision he was about to make. He didn’t know what he should write, how to express that he would never be back without giving away where he was. Finally, he settled on a simple message, ‘I signed up for a suicide mission so we will never meet,’ then, thinking better of it, he added, ‘sorry about that.’ As far as messages went, it was terrible, but it got the point across.

He didn’t expect an answer, so it never even occurred to him to look at his hand again to see if there would be any new marks there. Instead, he took his laptop to play some golf and then went to sleep. As bad as that was, it was over and done now.

\---

He was washing his hands in the morning when he realized he never expected an answer. He rubbed his hand without paying much attention to it, and only when he failed to clean it he realized there was a new message, written under where his was, going down his arm all the way to the elbow. His soulmate clearly had some opinions.

‘That’s typical,’ the message on his wrist started, ‘not even my soulmate wants to meet me. I would be angry, but I guess I contributed to his, I have been living a really isolated life. And now I guess I could say I have permanently relocated to an isolated scientific community, so odds are we would never have met. What I’m really angry about is that I never thought about using this to send a message. What can I say, soulmate connection theory is a soft science, even worse than medicine.’

There was something almost familiar about that handwriting, but he couldn’t quite pinpoint how, so maybe it was just a part of being soulmates, or maybe he was still thinking about the equations he sometimes saw written on his skin.

He wasn’t prepared for this to be a conversation, but the urge to say something was too strong. If he was a believer, he would think that this was the connection being consolidated, the thing everyone would talk about when they mentioned meeting their soulmates. But since he wasn’t, he simply thought that he liked the idea of talking to someone without talking.

Against his better judgment, he took the marker again, and wrote on his left palm, where he had erased the previous message, ‘So I guess we were made NOT to be, now clean up your arm, it’s too hot where I am for long sleeves.’

\---

He didn’t mean to make a routine of it, but it was just too easy. He wouldn’t say he now believed in the power of soulmates or some nonsense like this, but he had grown used to their conversations, usually writing a message before bed and then getting one back by the time he woke up, which made him wonder where his soulmate lived and how they never questioned him about his timezone, as Atlantis had longer days than Earth so they had to be out of sync.

Without talking about it, they decided on a few rules. They didn’t do names, not only theirs but anyone they talked about. Gender, country, profession and timezone were also off limits, although he did know his soulmate was a scientist of some kind, and he had said something about being in the military, although he never mentioned the branch.

In fact, all he knew about his soulmate was: they were a scientist who hated those they considered lesser scientists, they liked blondes (but didn’t mind it when he said he had black hair), and their biggest hero was Batman.

Everything was going too well, so of course something had to go wrong.

For the first time, he saw the message being written, just a couple minutes after he wrote his. ‘Do you want to go out on a date?’

He stared at the message, not quite believing what he was seeing. He thought they were clear on what this was, and it wasn’t like a relationship.

‘I don’t even know what country you’re in and I can’t leave the place I am.’ That should do it, he hoped.

The previous message was erased, and replaced. ‘I don’t mean it like this, I can’t bring you to where I am.’

‘Then what do you mean?’

‘We could do something together and talk, like this.’

John needed a moment to think. ‘I don’t think that is a good idea. We shouldn’t pretend this is something it’s not.’

‘What do you mean?’

John sighed, this was even more difficult than having a face to face conversation. He cleaned everything he could of his hand, but even that wasn’t enough, so he lifted his sleeve. ‘We’ll never meet, so what’s the use of pretending like we are dating? We will never meet and you have to move on with your life. The longer it takes for you to admit that this will never work, the worse it will be for you. I’m sorry.’

He waited for a reply, but none came. Then, when he had gave up on waiting and went back to preparing to go to bed, he noticed the reply, written across his forehead. ‘Fuck you too’ Well, that was it, there was no way they would be back to talking now.

He just hoped that by next morning the message was gone.

\---

The message wasn’t gone when he woke up. His soulmate was probably really furious at him if they were willing to walk around with that written across their forehead too just to force him to do it. With a little work, he was able to style his hair just enough to cover it, although it made him look like a cyclone hit him. Luckily, no one noticed, and by the time he checked it again, the message was gone.

\---

He stopped thinking about his soulmate. He didn’t worry about leaving people behind when he left Earth, and he wouldn’t start now. He had his people to worry about, and that was more important than the feelings of someone he didn’t even know. Things would never have worked out anyway, so it was better that it had ended after just a few months. Which incidentally was the same way he used to think about his marriage.

If John had his way, he would never think about his soulmate again. Too bad things couldn’t be that easy.

\---

John killed people. He remembered every time that happened, and all the reasons why it had to happen.

He remembered enough to know he never killed this many people.

He would do it again, if he had too. John decided a long time ago that he would do whatever it took to protect Atlantis and his people, no matter the cost, be it his life or his conscience.

It was only when he came back to his room that he noticed the cut on his arm. It looked deep, but it didn’t hurt, and he didn’t remember getting cut. Still, he didn’t need to add infection to his list of problems, so he better clean it. He cleaned the cut absently, finally stopping when he felt no pain, and no change in the pattern of the blood.

And then it hit him.

The cut wasn’t his, and John had seen it before. Or rather, he saw the bandage where the cut must have been. Except it couldn’t. He had to be wrong, because there was no way this was what he thought it was. McKay of all people couldn’t be his soulmate, as far as John knew he didn’t even believe in soulmates, if that rant he went on about how it was probably just a quantic connection between organic matter that had nothing to do with love or emotion was anything to go by. No, the very idea was absurd.

There was only one way he could be sure.

John took off his sweat band, he needed a place he could hide but McKay wouldn’t. Thinking about what to write was easy, the cut gave him the perfect excuse. ‘What the hell happened to you?’ Short and to the point, and with any luck McKay wouldn’t cover it. That is, his soulmate, who probably wasn’t McKay, wouldn’t cover it, or rather, McKay wouldn’t have anything to cover and John could put this at rest.

John rubbed his eyes, it was too late, and he had had too terrible a day to be thinking about that. On some level, he was aware that fixating on his soulmate after so long not caring about them was a way to deflect thinking about what happened, but it wasn’t enough to stop him from thinking like this.

\---

“How’s the arm?” John asked casually, or casually enough in any case.

McKay looked at him like he had just said psychology was a science. “Hurts less than knowing I broke and gave them what they wanted. Is that what you wanted to know?” he asked in an accusatory tone.

“I was just checking on you.”

He should talk to McKay, help him deal with that. It was his role as team leader. But then he saw his own handwriting, barely showing over the rim of McKay’s sleeve.

“If that would be all, I have work to do.”

John took a deep breath, trying not to panic. “We should talk about that later but I, uh, I’ll let you work now.” Then he left.

He couldn’t reach his room fast enough. His soulmate. He met his soulmate. This couldn’t be possible, it made no sense. He ran the numbers to try to calm his thoughts, the odds of finding his soulmate in a group the size of the expedition, taking into consideration the survival rate and the decreasing likelihood of a soulmate meet past the age of thirty, was around 1 in 132,783,098, give or take a couple hundred.

It was close to impossible, but Atlantis was the place where impossible things happened, and if soulmates were truly people that complemented each other, then there was something to be said about the type of people willing to take an one-way trip into the unknown.

The words forming on the palm of his hand stopped that train of thought.

‘You wouldn’t believe me if I told you.’

He ran to grab the marker, writing a response before he could think better of it. ‘Try me.’

The words were quickly erased and replaced, and John wondered how he never recognized the frenetic style as McKay’s.

‘I thought you didn’t care.’

‘I care,’ he paused, ‘more than I should.’

When the answer didn’t came as soon as the other one, he wondered if that had been the wrong thing to say. Almost a minute passed before the new words appeared.

‘I was tortured, if you can call it that. They didn’t have to get very far. I guess I’m weaker than I thought I was.’

He hit the back of his head against the wall. This was a disaster, McKay needed more help than he could give, especially if he had to act like he didn’t know what had happened. Still, he started this, so he had to finish it.

And maybe, just maybe, talking about it could help him too.

\---

They went back to talking, just as cryptically as they had before. John didn't have a good reason as to why he hadn't told McKay what he knew, but the longer it passed, the harder it was to find a way or even a reason to bring up the subject. Things were going well, he figured. There was no reason to talk about them.

However, something changed when his soulmate stopped being an abstract idea or just writing on his skin and became a full person. It’s easy to dismiss an idea, to convince himself it could never work because they would never meet and even if they did, nothing assured him that they would be good for each other. Ignoring McKay, however, was already impossible before John knew they were soulmates, and it only became harder.

The problem was, McKay could be a tactless ass at times, but they fit well together. No, it was more than that, they didn’t only match, they complemented each other. And the more he realized that, the harder it was to ignore the truth in front of him. Luckily, John had gotten pretty good at ignoring emotional truths over the years.

\---

After the last couple of days, all John wanted was to get some sleep. Of course McKay’s life had to be in danger, and of course it had to be because something they could barely understand happened involving Wraith tech. He had wanted to send McKay a message during that time, but with another conscience inside of him, it was too risky, even if John had no plans of revealing himself. The whole message thing they had going was such a big taboo that it might land McKay in serious trouble, or at least quite a few mandated sessions with Heightmeyer.

He wasn’t jealous because of the kiss with Carson. McKay obviously wasn’t the one in control of his body at that moment. Also, John didn’t have any claim to be jealous. That was an important part to remember, especially because McKay told him all about that date he didn’t want to hear about. All John had to do was ignore what he’d heard and what he saw and then things could still be just as they were before.

The ‘I met someone’ that showed up on his hand seemed to disagree with him.

John sighed, and actually considered ignoring the message, but he didn’t have the right to make McKay feel bad about wanting to date when, as far as he knew, he would never meet his soulmate because they were in different galaxies and his soulmate could die any moment now on Earth and he would never hear about it.

‘Is that so?’ he answered, but a lack of something better to say.

‘Don’t be like this, you were the one that started by saying we would never meet,’ came the answer.

‘Hey, you’re the one reading that as passive-aggressive.’ Even though it definitely was.

‘Right. Well, I had a date. Good date, a bit awkward. I kissed her, sort of, it’s complicated. I may see her again.’

‘Then it’s probably best if we stopped talking, wouldn’t want her to see my words on your skin.’ Fine, that was not what he was planning to say, because he wasn’t jealous, just…

John rubbed his eyes, giving up. He was too tired to deal with this. He went to bed without checking for a response.

\---

True to his word, or perhaps his stubbornness, John didn’t contact McKay again, at least not as his soulmate. Things between them were still as they had always been, as far as McKay knew, and at least McKay never decided to tell him about his secret conversations with this soulmate, that would have been awkward.

It was only fair that John would try to act as if nothing had changed, he couldn’t punish the guy for wanting someone else when John himself refused to let him know the truth. It was what John forced himself to focus on, it was his choice, not McKay’s, that put them in this mess and kept them there, so it was only fair that he dealt with it alone.

Absently, he wondered how things might have been different if he hadn’t contacted McKay, if they hadn’t been talking when he discovered his soulmate. And perhaps even worse, he wondered what McKay’s reaction would be if he told him the truth now.

\---

John was heads over heels in love with his best friend, who also happened to be his soulmate. It would be perfect, if his soulmate hadn’t just told him he was planning to proposing to someone else.

Then came the lockdown, and McKay was trapped in a botanics lab, probably losing his mind, and had possibly already made the worst mistake of his entire life. As John knew too well, marrying someone who wasn’t your soulmate could end in all sorts of disaster.

He wasn’t thinking when he first got the pen, his only instinct was to help McKay. Even if he couldn’t answer, it would be good to know people on the outside were dealing with it. He paused just before touching ink to skin. There was no way to convey that without revealing his identity, but if he was honest with himself, that was something he wanted to do every time McKay talked about Katie.

‘Don’t panic, we are coming for you,’ he started on his palm, not caring if someone would see. ‘Yeah, I know, I should have told you I was here too and that I knew who you are. Sorry about that. There’s no epidemic, just a malfunction in the system, I’ll have that fixed in no time.’ He didn’t sign, but he didn’t need to. With what he had said about himself in the past, and now this message, there was no way McKay wouldn’t guess it was him. But that was something to deal with in another moment.

\---

John wasn’t exactly avoiding McKay. He was just… avoiding the labs and McKay’s room and basically everywhere where he might be. Which was different, somehow. There was definitely a distinction there.

At any rate, there was so much to deal with after the quarantine was over, it was easy to keep busy. Even if ‘busy’ also meant not easily found. It wasn’t until the next day that McKay was somehow able to track him down, while he was inspecting a secluded part of the city for no good reason other than it was secluded.

“How long have you known?” came McKay’s voice.

They were going straight to the point then.

“The day of the storm, when they cut you. Not then, but after, I saw the cut when I went to sleep, that was when I knew.”

McKay ruffled. “So that’s why you decided to go back to talking to me. I have to say, I understand what you were saying a lot better now.”

“I should have said something.”

“Then why didn’t you? Why did you let me believe that I was… I know you don’t care about soulmates, but you should have said something.”

“And you care? You told me yourself you didn’t believe this was real.”

“I’m a scientist, I wanted proof, was that asking too much?”

John closed his eyes for a moment, the last thing he wanted was to hurt McKay. “Look, McKay, I just didn’t want things to change.”

“And you think what, you’re the first person who didn’t want their soulmate? Or perhaps I should be grateful that you just lied to me, I’ve heard of people killing to get away from their soulmates.” The hurt in his voice was clear enough to see, and John did this to him.

“That’s not… I’ve never said… I wasn’t trying to get rid of you.”

“Then why were you going to let me marry someone else?”

And that was the question, wasn’t it? Why did he let it get this far? Why didn’t he say something sooner? John hoped this was a ‘better late than never’ kind of situation.

“Don’t marry her,” John said, almost too low for McKay to hear.

McKay laughed, then looked at John as if he was one of his scientists that had just said something absurd. “Now why would I do that?”

Before John had time to process what that meant, McKay took a step forward and grabbed John by the back of the head. It wasn’t a gentle kiss on either side, but rather demanding. The moment they connected was like closing a circuit, electricity finally allowed to roam.

And in that moment, more than ever before, John believed he had found his soulmate.


End file.
